Success = 20% Strategy and 80% Mindset

Sailendra Kumar, Director - Product Management

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein

As I see it, sometimes at work, and in life, we get stuck in a loop. We get the washing machine fixed every time when it acts up, and don’t ask too many questions around perhaps a plumbing problem that causes these issues to erupt again and again. We keep treating the symptoms instead of addressing the actual illness.

At Goibibo, I was presented with a similar problem. Every day we had a daily downtime of 10 minutes due to payment gateway issues; much like the washing machine. And the easiest way was to just fix it temporarily saying “I can’t”, instead of spending time to understand the root cause and asking “How can I” fix the issue. The temporary solution was just that—temporary. We definitely needed to look at the “plumbing problem”. And, when we looked, we realized there were two issues:

We were dependent on a single payment gateway and

We were not looking at other payment options that a customer might need—like a UPI or other affordable options like payment wallets.

But the main issue here was that, we were not looking at the payment process from the customer’s point of view. We needed to change this particular mindset first and then follow it with clear & defined actionable. We needed to ensure that we never lose sight of the challenges coming from the customer’s point of view.

Within five months, ably backed by a team of talented engineers, we went live on three payment gateways (PG) and two PGs, only for UPI. We wrote a machine learning code to ensure if one payment gateway is down or fails, there are two other PGs ready to complete the booking. We designed precise tracking metrics aligned to our larger mission of building a payment system, keeping the customer at the heart of the process.

The result? One year later, UPI transactions went from a 12% to a 32.33%. The overall success rate improved by 4.5% points. Refund success rate improved to a 99.7% from a 85%. In January, we received the Team Squad Award for the quarter. Working together to create this impact has been extremely gratifying.

Truth be told, it all began with changing the mindset and aligning it to addressing the customer’s needs.